On Saturday, 29 May, BP conceded that their effort to stanch the flow of oil from the wreckage of the Deepwater Horizon using drilling mud, golf balls and other debris had failed. BP and the United States Coast Gaurd have also released their revised estimate of the volume of escaping oil to be somewhere between 500,000 and 1,000,000 gallons per day. This figure comes closer to the estimates that independent scientists have been suggesting since 27 April, when SkyTruth and Dr. Ian MacDonald of Florida State University, first announced an estimate of at least 1.1 million gallons and very possibly much more. Currently the drilling of relief wells, the only proven method of stopping an offshore blowout, begun in early May and not expected to be completed until August,  is reported to be 6,000 feet into the rock.
      Today is the 40th day of this crisis. Every day another million gallons, at least, erupts into the Gulf. By the latest satellite imagery, the slick appears to be well ‘entrained’ in the warm ocean current that flows out of the Gulf of Mexico and becomes the Gulf stream, moving up the East coast of the North America and eventually across the Atlantic to northern Europe.